Saturday, March 4, 2006

Everything's coming together

Start by making surrealist-inspired manifestos or montages of your research. Choose a public location to geocache your manifesto. (Hide.) Look for manifestos in your neighbourhood. (Seek.) Place-storm spectacularly and report.

"PlaceStorming is a collaborative, pervasive play scenario that uses mobile network technologies and digital media devices to facilitate, as a public practice, context-aware and location-specific academic research. It asks participants to cite (reference and interpret) and to site (put into a specific, real-world context) each other’s work in playful and spectacular ways.

If my academic research were a superhero, what would its mission and superpowers be?

Can computer-supported collaborative brainstorming become a significant part of our individual research practices?

What is the challenge of our individual research projects? What does it ask its audience to do?

What is the public mission of our individual research projects? What do we dream it will accomplish in the real-world? How do we intend it to intervene in the everyday social sphere?

How do we want our research to engage crowds and communities—and to what ends, in which locations?

Is it possible to cite each others’ work in a more site-specific manner? To use real-world locations as new kind of context for exploring academic theory?

PlaceStorming, as a high-performance game, is also an effort to make academic work more 'spectacular,' in a literal sense, that is 'an elaborate display, dramatic and impressive.' Spectacular research will be able, I believe, to capture the attention and imagination of non-academic communities, that is to say the public, in order to better collaborate and communicate with them. This strategy applies equally well to the goal of achieving more meaningful interdisciplinary impact; spectacular interventions could potentially engage a wider range of researchers than would normally be drawn to study or investigate work from a particular academic domain or design industry."